Quick lesson though I'll bet you already know. The sound you hear from your firearm is usually two sounds combined. One is sonic "crack" that happens when the round breaks the speed of sound. The other is the explosion, or rather the expanding gasses exiting the barrel. The shorter barrel allows less room for those gasses to expand and cool. A "silencer" simply allows for the cooling and expansion of those gasses before exiting the muzzle of your firearm. I'm sure that I've looked over the technicals here but this is how it was explained to me. Also...why use a silencer? Simply grab the nearest empty two liter and slide it over the muzzle...should do close enough to what you want as long as you secure it...and BATFE isn't going to raid your house because you have empty plastic bottles in your garage. Of course they aren't as efficient as modern suppresors and they don't look pretty OR intimidating on the end of your particular firearm...but when in need...

Someone please correct me if anything I've said is less than truthful.

The powder is not “expanding and cooling” in its trip down the barrel. It is burning constantly, producing more gas, which means more pressure, which means faster bullet.

That’s why a bullet from a longer barrel is faster than one from a shorter barrel. Longer barrel time means more gas pressure.

The BANG at the end is the unburned powder all going off at once, when it hits the oxygen at the end of the barrel. While it is in the barrel it is burning at a specific speed. This speed depends on how the powder was made. You are aware, aren’t you, that powders have different burning rates?

The BANG from a 2” barrel is louder than one from a 6” barrel, because less powder was burned in the shorter tube, so more went off all at once.

If you take a silenced 22 automatic pistol, and shoot the entire magazine, it sounds like this: POP pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop. The first round is louder than the others. That’s because the silencer is full of oxygen for the first shot. For the rest of the magazine the can is full of burned powder gases. But, after shooting that mag empty, if you stop and reload it, when you shoot again, it will sound like POP pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop. That’s because during the time it took to reload the magazine, the burned gases were replaced with oxygen, again. If, however, you spray nitrogen down the barrel, before firing the first round, there is no “First Round Pop”. They all sound the same.

Now, for the second part of your statement.

Yes, if you attach a 2-litre bottle to the muzzle of your gun, and it is a low-powered gun, it will work for a few shots. The plastic bottle will act like the baffles in the can and collect the powder gases, and allow them to bleed off slowly and quietly. Until you have shot the bottom out of the bottle. Each shot will be progressively louder as a bigger hole appears allowing more oxygen into the bottle.

If, however, you attach your 2-liter bottle to a high-powered gun, like a 223, the first shot will blow the bottom of the bottle out, and you will have accomplished nothing.

Well, that’s not quite right. You will have accomplished one thing. You will have committed a major federal felony. As soon as you put that bottle on that barrel, you have made an unregistered silencer. Good for 10 years at Club Fed and a 250,000-dollar fine. It doesn’t even have to work. Stick a potato on the end of your gun and you have made an unregistered silencer. Attempting to muffle the noise of a firearm, even if you don’t succeed, is the same crime as making a good one.

If you want a quiet gun, you have two good choices. Get a long barrel and load specifically for it. 24” barrel with a light powder charge and you can get awful quiet, for shooting blue jays in the back yard. Or, buy a registered silencer. Jump through the government hoops and pay the big bucks. ‘Cause friends and neighbors, six hundred dollars for a licensed can beats the HELL out of a quarter million dollar fine.

Making them yourself is also a good option. While it takes a bit of experience on a lathe, it is not that hard. I learned how to use a lathe when making my first silencer for a 300 whisper AR-15. There is nothing like the feeling of doing it yourself. Sort of like the feeling you get when you re-barrel a rifle, but twice as nice.

But there is a down side and I am not talking about waiting for the ATF form 1 (application to make and register a firearm) to be approved or the $200 tax that has to be paid. Even though the maker/owner of a silencer registered on an ATF form made the parts themselves, they can not replace any parts that might become damaged or lost in the future. The only exception to this is wipes, the rubber disks that some silencers use. They need to be replaced very few mags to stay in good working order, so it seems like a real pain in the butt.

The only way to legally replace parts on a form 1 silencer is to pay another tax, or send it to a SOT class 2 manufacturer and hope they will work on it. If I were to pay another $200 tax, I would rather make a whole new silencer instead of just replacing parts. The law is not very clear on this except to say that silencer parts are themselves silencers. The ATF has interpreted this to mean another tax has to be paid to make even one replacement part. It is a real drag in part because it means experimenting with new designs can be a very expensive proposition for the form 1 builder.

I am sort of getting around paying the $200 tax myself by making a few silencers for others who present me with an approved ATF form 1 so I can help them make it on the lathe for them, using my latest design.

I use a trust to own my silencers for me. I went round and round for a while on how to do it and in the end bought Quicken software to make a trust. Despite some people warning me that the ATF could somehow decide that a trust made without a lawyer could be invalid someday, I went with it. It has not been an issue so far.

Just remember to make a copy of the form 1 before you send it in just in case you forget the serial number. I was on the phone asking for the status of the approval a few months ago and gave the ATF employee four numbers before guessing the right one.

I am 40 years old and suffer from a constant ringing in my ears and partial hearing loss due to the loud report from rifles and shotguns .

Supressors were included in the NFA because a few ignorant fools received their education from movies, instead of taking the time to learn the facts. Supressors do not "silence" any gun, and they are not tools used by criminals. Supressors simply reduce the sound a gun shot makes by anywhere from 20 decibels - 45 decibels.

If supressors were more readily available for purchase like they should be, I would not be living with hearing loss.

Probably not since you didn't copy a 5 year old comment in your post where one of our Staff may have miss-spoke a bit.

Just FYI, you most likely got caught up posting along side a troll who would not drop that whole "Illegal silencer thing" after being warned several times he continued to bounce around within TFF spewing his garbage in several of our forums, so things got deleted and he was eventually banned (You're welcome).